Summary of: Liberalism and Transformation: The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention

Full Description

How have liberal internationalists conceived of global politics? How have these ideas changed over time, and how do they relate to processes of international action like war, intervention, and violence? Although liberalism is often portrayed by scholars, intellectuals and policymakers as an ideology that leads to peace, liberalism is also an ideology that mobilizes societies for war. From colonial wars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through military interventions in Latin America and the Middle East during the Cold War and after, liberalism as an ideology has been used to justify violence, construct ideas of the enemy, and provide visions of post-intervention futures. International liberalism is imagined as a harbinger of peace, modernity, and cooperation; it has also often been a harbinger of bullets, cannons, and fighter jets.

Liberalism and Transformation shows that one strand of liberal ideology, what I have termed emancipatory liberalism, has a long, and complicated, historical connection with violence and intervention in word politics. There are several instances in modern history where we find emancipatory liberalism, as both a set of political principles and collective identity, mobilized to defend and shape state action and the use of force. These forms of violence, in the counterfactual, may not have been configured in the way that they were without international liberalism providing the context of social action for states. For example, governments often cast colonial wars in the nineteenth century as being part of a broader process of market expansion, and “civilizing” progress. Andrew Jackson explicitly couched his “removal policy” of the Amerindians, for instance, in a language where tribes represented the antithesis to progress, civilization, and American destiny. The philosopher John Stuart Mill’s writings on empire, as well, indicate a clear liberal logic for coercion and violence over Britain’s colonial possessions.

In contemporary international politics, actors carry out and justify violence with a universalist logic of emancipation and individualism, which would not be possible without such a language of liberalism. Even in wars that are widely acknowledged to have been waged for other reasons, a discourse of liberalism justified and brought meaning to episodes of force. For example, in attempting to sell the Iraq War, policymakers, including US President George W. Bush, branded the proposed intervention as an emancipatory one.

Liberalism and Transformation is the first scholarly work that explores the historical, philosophical, and intellectual development of global liberalism since the nineteenth century in the context of the deployment of violence, force, and intervention. Using an approach that includes interpretive and contextual analysis of texts from writers, philosophers, and policy-makers across nearly two centuries, as well as historiographical and historical analysis of archival documents (some of which have been recently declassified) and other media, Liberalism and Transformation narrates the messy history of emancipatory liberalism and its engagement with issues of war and peace. The book examines four distinct periods in the history of modern liberal internationalism: liberal empire of the nineteenth century; interwar internationalism of the early 20th century; Cold War liberalism; and the post-Cold War order.

This book is also about discourses and their power in international history. Discourses, like political theories and ideologies, influence the way that states act and create the space for actors to interpret their positions, practices, and beliefs about the world. Emancipatory liberalism does this in three ways. First, it structures justifications for violence. Second, emancipatory discourses affect the way intervention is practiced, institutionalized, and operationalized. Third, emancipatory liberalism has an impact on how the liberal democracies confront resistance. The book contributes to both a rethinking of liberal democracy and its relationship to world politics, as well as the effects of liberal internationalism on global processes.

Furthermore, Liberalism and Transformation invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. In the first place, it shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. In the second place, it suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex. This has implications for the transformative potential of alternatives and dissident perspectives. Additionally, it opens the space for such an alternative vision. It is a central theme of this book that world politics need not be one structured around violence and intervention. A focus on what I call “minimalist” liberalism as the basis for international society, a topic further elaborated in the concluding chapter, finds a foothold in a variety of dissenting discourses that have existed, in one form or another, alongside emancipatory imaginings of violence and intervention.

Contribution

Liberalism and Transformation contributes to four different enterprises in a synthetic way: (1) empirically documenting the rise of global liberalism; (2) theoretically addressing the literature on violence in world politics; (3) methodologically extending the boundaries of discourse analysis in international relations theory; (4) normatively engaging with the promises and pitfalls of liberal world order. First, Liberalism and Transformation contributes to the growing empirical literature on liberalism in world politics. While much of international relations scholarship on liberalism focuses on the role that liberalism plays in pacifying global politics, Liberalism and Transformation develops a narrative of liberalism’s connection to practices of violence in world politics. And, while work within critical IR has focused on the destructive potentials of neoliberalism and late modern capitalism in contemporary politics, these studies often focus their attention squarely on the post-Cold War period. Liberalism and Transformation charts a longer, and more comprehensive, history of liberal internationalism and its relation to violence in world politics. Second, Liberalism and Transformation contributes to the existing literature on violence in international relations theory, by drawing connections between liberalism, international discourses, and the deployment of force. It is a central contention of the book that violence is not simply the material practices of war and intervention, but is also expressed in the ways that intellectuals, policymakers, and publics “write war.” Claire Thomas (2011) has pointed out that IR has notably neglected the theoretical and empirical study of “violence” as such; this book aims to fill that gap within the larger context of a narrative about the development of international liberalism. Third, this book is unique in its approach to the study of discourse in world politics. While existing studies have tended to treat discourse as something worth studying internally, and others have focused on how discourses can help us understand changes in international norms, Liberalism and Transformation illustrates an approach to studying discourse historically that demonstrates the close connection between the way actors articulate ideas, and the way that actors actualize those ideas in practice, violence, and intervention. An article that delves into the use of discourse methodology in this book is forthcoming at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, signaling scholarly interest in this methodological contribution. Finally, Liberalism and Transformation contributes to a rethinking of the normative bases of a global liberal international order. By introducing, in the concluding chapter, the concept of a “minimalist liberalism,” the book suggests a way forward for policymakers, scholars, and a global public to reconceptualize liberal internationalism from the perspective of pluralism and restraint, rather than continue failed policies and practices associated with an emancipatory-liberal interventionism. While other works have interrogated the bases and futures of liberal world order from different angles, Liberalism and Transformation integrates a critique of emancipatory liberalism while doing so from within the tradition of liberalism, something missing in much of critical IR’s reaction to liberalism.